Red Brigades - 1978: A New Stage in the Class War?: Selected Documents from the Spring Campaign of the Red Brigades

1978: A New Stage in the Class War?

Selected Documents on the Spring Campaign of the Red Brigades

1978: A New Stage in the Class War?

Selected Documents on the Spring Campaign of the Red Brigades

Edited and translated by Joshua Depaolis

ISBN 978-1-989701-07-2

Published in 2019 by Kersplebedeb

This edition Kersplebedeb

All rights reserved

To order copies of the book:

Kersplebedeb
CP 63560, CCCP Van Horne
Montreal, Quebec
Canada
HW H

Contents

Acronym Key

BRBrigate Rosse; the Red Brigades.

CCCarabinieri; The national police force of Italy, one of the countrys three main law enforcement agencies, alongside the Polizia di Stato (PS) and the Guardia di Finanza (GdF).

CGILConfederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro; The Italian General Confederation of Labour, one of the main Italian trade unions, close to the Italian Communist Party.

CISLConfederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori; The Italian Confederation of Trade Unions, one of the main Italian trade unions, close to Christian Democracy.

CPI (ML) Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist); Formed in 1969 by revolutionaries purged from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) following criticism of the increasingly parliamentary character of its politics. The CPI(ML) advocated immediate armed struggle and denounced participation in the electoral process.

CPMCollettivo Politico Metropolitano; The Metropolitan Political Collective, a New Left group created out of a merger on September 8, 1969, of several radical worker and worker-student organizations. It was the organization out of which the Red Brigades would emerge.

CSMConsiglio superiore della magistratura; a formally independent body which oversaw the judiciary under Italys 1947 Constitution.

DCDemocrazia Cristiana; Formed in 1944, Christian Democracy was the mass, conservative Catholic party in Italy in the postwar period. From 1948 through the 1970s every Italian Prime Minister was from the DC.

EECThe European Economic Community was established to bring about economic integration among the states of Western Europe within the imperialist system. Upon the formation of the European Union in 1993, the EEC was incorporated and renamed as the European Community. In 2009 the ECs institutions were absorbed into the EUs wider framework and the community ceased to exist.

ERPEjrcito Revolucionario del Pueblo; the Peoples Revolutionary Army, the military branch of the communist Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores in Argentina.

ETAEuskadi Ta Askatasuna; an armed leftist nationalist and separatist organization in the Basque Country.

FRGFederal Republic of Germany; the Western section of Germany, which was divided into two countries in the decades following World War II. The FRG was one of the main pro-U.S. powers in Europe throughout its existence.

GDFGuardia di Finanza; Under the control of the Ministry of the Finance, one of Italys three main law enforcement agencies, alongside the Carabinieri (CC) and the Polizia di Stato (PS).

GPGauche Proltarienne; A French Maoist group founded in 1968, based heavily in both factory and school action committees, and promoting direct action kidnapping bosses, sabotage, theft, and civil war. Members identified as the new partisans who would continue on with the struggle of the antifascist resistance of World War II. Between 1968 and 1972, roughly one thousand members would be arrested; the government eventually banned the group forcing its leadership underground. In late 1973, in a controversial decision made behind closed doors by the leadership, the group was disbanded.

GSG-9A German paramilitary counterguerrilla police unit established in response to the 1972 Black September action in Munich and operating under the authority of the border police.

IMFInternational Monetary Fund; Created in 1945, one of the key international capitalist management bodies to emerge in the postwar period.

IRAIrish Republican Army; Founded in 1969, a paramilitary organisation that sought to end British rule in Northern Ireland, to facilitate the reunification of Ireland, and to bring about an independent republic.

ISMImperialist State of the Multinationals; a concept put forth by the BR, as outlined in their February 1978 Resolution of the Strategic Directorate: The Imperialist State of the Multinationals is the national institutional superstructure that corresponds to the stage of the imperialism of the multinationals. Its essential characteristics are as follows: the creation of an imperialist political personnel; the rigid centralization of state structures under the control of the executive; reformism and annihilation as integrated expressions of the same function: the preventative counter-revolution.

PMORProletarian Movement of Offensive Resistance (Movimento Proletario di Resistenza Offensiva); a concept put forth by the Red Brigades: the area of antagonistic class practice produced by the escalation of the economic and political crisis. The term PMOR denotes the area of forces, groups, and revolutionary units which provide politicomilitary content to their anticapitalist, antiimperialist, and antirevisionist initiatives in the struggle for communism.

MSIMovimento Sociale Italiano; Italian Social Movement; Formed shortly after World War II in 1946, the legal heir to Mussolinis fascist party of the same name. The main far right political party in Italy in the 1970s.

NAPNuclei Armati Proletari; a primarily Southern proletarian and lumpenproletarian armed organization born in 1974 and active until 1977, many of whose members would eventually join the BR.

NAPAPNoyaux arms pour lautonomie populaire; The Armed Nuclei for Popular Autonomy was a communist guerrilla group that formed in France in 1976; they would carry out a number of armed actions in 1976 and 1977.

ONOrdine Nuovo; New Order was a fascist organization implicated in several assassinations and bombings, often targeting civilians in the hopes of spreading terror as part of a strategy of tension.

PCCPartito Comunista Combattente; The Fighting Communist Party was a concept promoted by the Red Brigades, as detailed in the present volume.

PCIPartito Comunista Italiano; Formed in 1921, the PCI in the 1970s was a classic example of a European working-class reformist party. As a vestige of its past as an actual Communist Party, the PCI was nominally pro-Moscow and anti-American in world affairs.

PPSSThe government ministry that managed the State Shareholdings System, whereby the Italian government owned or invested in various corporatons.

PSPolizia di Stato; Under the control of the Ministry of the Interior, one of Italys three main law enforcement agencies, alongside the Carabinieri (CC) and the Guardia di Finanza (GdF).

PSDIPartito Socialista Democratico Italiano; A small social-democratic party, rabidly anti-communist. In the period following that treated in this book, the PSDI would join Christian Democracy, the Italian Socialist Party, the Italian Republican Party, and the Italian Liberal Party in the five-party coalition, which ruled Italy from 1980 to 1994.

PSIPartito Socialista Italiano; The Italian Socialist Party was a pro-NATO social-democratic political party in the 1970s. The PSI would come to special prominence in the 1980s, when their leader Bettino Craxi, who had severed the residual ties with the Soviet Union and re-branded the party as liberal-socialist, served as Prime Minister (19831987).

RAF Red Army Faction; An armed underground anti-imperialist organization active from 1970-1998. While the group was based in West Germany, it played an important role in the rise of armed struggle throughout Western Europe, just as the measures directed against it and its prisoners by NATO and the FRG pushed states across Western Europe to develop more draconian repressive measures throughout this period.